1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a connection device of portable electronic equipment with anchorage device provided with a magnetic support, particularly for car driver and passenger compartments having ventilation air vents with fins.
2. Description of Related Art Including Information Disclosed Under 37 CFR 1.97 and 37 CFR 1.98.
Domain
It is known that there is the need to make the compartment comfortable, according to a capillary and as much uniform as possible distribution of the air flows which are then introduced in the car compartment from the external environment or even transiting through air conditioning or climatization systems located in proper compartments, as main flow source means. This distribution usually occurs through some air vents, which, being located in certain points of the car compartment, allow the localized diffusion of the corresponding secondary airflow. Said air vents, which are mainly located in the dashboard, centrally and more or less above the tunnel of the gear group, located in to the side of the steering wheel of the driver for the driver side, while located near the window for the passenger, are all located at the end of an articulated channeling which provides the secondary flow distribution drawing air from the main flow coming from said flow source means. In many others cases, some air vents are also located so as to involve the rear compartments, mainly located at the rear end of the central tunnel, but also under the seats, and in general in a position where they can be easily adjusted.
The conventional air vents consist of a protruding cover peripherally joined with the relative neck, at the internal surface of the car compartment and connected at its end to the relative ventilation duct on the rear side. Said cover is provided with a series of parallel and equidistant fins, rectangularly shaped in a plan view, with the ends hinged in an intermediate position along the two opposite inwardly-directed walls of the relative cover. Along the rear border of each fin, a seat is present for the engagement of a connecting vertical rod, which contextually engages all the fins. At the front side of the cover, at least one of the fins is provided with an appendix, so that, handling it and performing a movement along a vertical axis, it is possible to progressively change the incidence angle of the fins with respect to the flow, until, going on with the movement, most of the flow exit channel is occluded, the fins resulting transversely placed and partially overlapped.
The mobile phone, as well as the navigator, is well-known, and even small electronic processors. It is a kind of portable equipment which is widely used, by now every day, and follows the user almost in all circumstances. When one is driving a motor vehicle, single regulations impose, at least in some countries, the use of such equipment in safety conditions, we will say with the universal term hand free, that is to say with free hands. According to this, for said requirements to subsist, the portable equipment should preferably be safely fastened to a support that, in principle, is firmly or temporarily fixed inside the driver and passenger compartment of the motor vehicle in a position as close to the driver as possible, e.g. the dashboard or the gear tunnel, in order to be easily accessible without causing particular distractions.
State of the Art
There are various kinds of supports for portable electronic equipment, if not originally provided by the car manufacturer. Traditionally, the most widespread originate from devices having, on the anchorage base, a sucker, which is operated by a lever that cooperates with a cam, and obtains a depression sufficient to hold the base of the sucker in the desired position. From the sucker base originates the support arm, at the end of which different means for holding the electronic equipment can be included, e.g. screw clamps, Velcro strips and others. Further empirical supports are usually created directly by the user, for example with the use of double- sided adhesive tapes or of Velcro, in order to secure, for example on the dashboard, a first layer of material to which the electronic equipment is fastened.
Permanent magnets are equally well-known. Widely used in the car industry as well, they are employed to fix, in a removable way, various equipment and accessories, mostly external to the driver and passenger compartment. The magnets are attracted or repelled by various materials; a material strongly attracted by a magnet has a high magnetic permeability, e.g. iron and steel that are thus defined as ferromagnetic. There can be different magnets, for example Neodymium or ND magnets are the best since they behave well according to temperatures.
In some cases permanent magnets were used also inside the driver and passenger compartment, always as support means. One will remember, for example, when the dashboards of the driver and passenger compartment in a motor vehicle, instead of being made of plastic material, as they are now, were mostly made of metallic material, actually of common shaped metal plate. Being of ferromagnetic material, some accessories, above all gadgets and religious icons, had a magnetic tape on their back, mainly with the adhesive coupling interface, and shaped according to a square or even round geometric form. In this way, the gadget itself, attracted to the back because of the magnet, could be applied in the desired position.
In patent literature, there are some significant examples of application of a magnet for the support of equipment and accessories. SE512358 (Gustavsson), for example, describes a shielded magnetic mobile phone stand, fixable to the computer, monitor or television, including a steel container that circumscribes multipolar magnets. The container of magnets is fixed to the computer, by means of glue or of double-sided adhesive tape.
Closer to the invention, instead, is KR200a10012021 (Ahn), in which a neodymium magnetic mobile phone stand, with a three-pole section is described. A magnetic mobile phone stand is intended to fix a mobile phone without damaging the vehicle and can be easily held with respect to knocks and children. It consists of an elastic surface of a sponge or rubber body meant to be fixed to a curved part. A highly elastic front plate is adherent to the front side of the elastic surface by means of an adhesive agent such as latex. An aromatic compound is contained in the elastic surface and a hollow is formed in the centre to hold the magnet. A small bar containing iron is stuck to the mobile phone battery. A double-sided adhesive tape is added to the front face of the iron plate to attract the magnet. The used magnet has an upward or downward connection capacity or a three-pole section neodymium magnet, instead of a two-pole section magnet. The magnet with a three-pole magnetic field, has a broad magnetic field close to the pole because it has a uniform magnetic distribution. It does not affect inner electronic components.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,888,940 (Deppen). Describes a magnetic stand for mobile telephones. It consists of a cup made of ferromagnetic material, inside of which a magnet is supported. The back part of the cup contains double-sided adhesive tape in order to provide the fastening of the cup to the surface of the vehicle dashboard. The cup concentrates the magnet force along the front edge. A friction ring circumscribes the front edges of the cup and provides an effective holding of the mobile phone fixed to the cup by means of the magnetic attraction between the inner magnet and the battery of the mobile phone or other metallic parts.
In WO0049919 (Wemy) a magnetic coupling for various accessories and equipment is described. On the dashboard of a motor vehicle, by means of adhesive materials, a base is positioned made up of a magnet covered with rubber or neoprene, shaped in such a way as to peripherally produce a rounded surface. Various accessories with support aims can be connected to the base, providing a counter-shaped seat on the base made of ferromagnetic material.
Closest State of the Art to the Object of the Invention
DI: ITTV2007A000182 (Zanetti)
D2: W02008/042690 (Brown)
D3: JP101 26474 (Miyanaka)
In DI a magnetic connecting device is proposed for the support, particularly in cars, of a portable electronic equipment, comprising a base which integrates at least two side-by-side magnets, said magnetic connecting device being fixable in correspondence with an internal surface of the driver and passenger compartment, and a coupling plate including a ferromagnetic material which is fixable or integrated on the back of the equipment to be supported or in correspondence of the intermediate accessory arranged to support the equipment, in which the base, which is provided at a first side with an adhesive material layer adhering to the surface of the driver and passenger compartment, consists of the coplanar coupling of at least two reciprocally attracted permanent magnets, each magnet having a geometric design with a polygonal plant. The plate for the coupling to the base, which comprises at least one portion obtained by a ferromagnetic material, is of the type with the equipment coupling interface provided with a biadhesive material layer, while the face attracted by the base magnetic field has a dimension sufficient to self-centre on the magnets to which it must anchor, by means of the arrangement of the magnetic fields to which it is submitted.
In D2 a universal accessory to support the mobile phone headset is described, which comprises a “U” shaped receiver element for the support of the headset. The receiver element is joined, possibly in a removable way, to a connection device which is shaped as a clip in order to be fixed to a fin of an air vent grid of the driver and passenger compartment; the clip consisting of two elastically yielding articulations in order to confer an efficient retaining capacity to the clip.
In D3 a portable phone support is described. In this case, there is a bracket anchoring to the air vent fins, said bracket supporting a receiver element of the phone; the receiver element is provided on the sides with two elastically yielding jaws which hold the portable phone in a removable position, sideways embracing its borders.
From everything stated above, it is therefore reasonable to consider as known: a) The use of at least one magnet for the easily removable support of an electronic equipment or of a support accessory, e.g. a mobile phone, inside the driver and passenger compartment of a motor vehicle and in particular on the dashboard; b) The magnet or the magnets according to the destination a) of multipolar kind that is to say with the three-pole geometry of the magnetic field with a central nucleus and two side poles; c) At least two side-by-side magnets, of the type with inverted polarity integrated in a base with a circular geometric shape and intended to be coupled inside a counter-shaped female seat obtained in correspondence of the electronic equipment or in correspondence of the supporting accessory to be fixed; d) A connection device for the support of electronic equipment accessories, whose anchorage device consists of an elastically yielding clip, for the support of the phone headset, which anchorage device is fixed to the air vent fins of a driver and passenger compartment; e) An adjustable connection device to support of the mobile phone fixed in correspondence of the air vents inside a driver and passenger compartment.
Drawbacks
The above described solutions relative to the most relevant state of the art have, according to the applicant, some drawbacks. In particular, in DI the support integrating the magnet is not fixable in an adequate and coherent way to the dashboard of the motor vehicle. There is therefore an objective risk in the retaining of the electronic equipment because in the course of time the support, above all in consideration of the variable climatic conditions, can reasonably lose its adhesive capacity making the anchorage fail with the contextual fall of the equipment in the driver and passenger compartment. In DI the possible fall of the equipment is also due to the particular shape, at the base, of the retaining lowered seat integrating the side-by-side magnets and to the consequent shape of the counter-shaped coupling plate made of ferromagnetic material, which is joined to the equipment. This shape, substantially with a quadrilateral plant, seem not to ensure a sufficient holding degree between the components, causing the possible exit of the coupling plate from its seat, also and due to the continuous stresses to which the vehicle is subject during the driving which inevitably have an effect inside the driver and passenger compartment. Always the particular shape of the seat in the base, does not allow an easy and fast approaching of the electronic equipment, and furthermore it seems not to not allow the orientation of the equipment when it is in the supported condition.
D2 suggests a supporting device for phone headset or auriculars, which due to the light weight, has a connection to the air vent fin non suitable to support different loads as the conventionally greater weight of a mobile phone, because the used clip embracing the fin uses for the retention only its elastic capacity, and therefore it seems not to ensure a lasting good anchorage capacity, having a fall risk.
D3 suggests a complex and cumbersome solution, of a conventional type, which moreover requires laborious operations intended to fix in a stable way the supporting device to the air vent, and presents reasonable difficulties in taking and positioning the mobile phone. In the less relevant solution described in SE51 2358 (Gustavsson) it can be observed that the magnets are not in direct contact with the accessory, but exploit a perimetrical container constituting an induced attraction surface, that could alter the effectiveness of the magnet action with consequent accidental detachment of the equipment. Other solutions with multipolar magnets, seems to be effectively suitable for a good fastening of the accessory or of the equipment, however, consisting of a magnet of monolithic construction, it needs a sufficient flat space and significant sizes which today are difficult to be found in the conventional internal design of cars.
Finally, in relation to W00049919 (Wemy) it was observed that it combines the action of the magnet, which is fixed on the dashboard of the motor vehicle, with a housing seat obtained in the device or in correspondence of its intermediate supporting accessory, a solution that supposedly could improve the retaining effectiveness. However, it seems reasonable to suppose that the use of a conventional monolithic magnet, does not confer a good retaining capacity of the accessory at all, this considering also that sometimes the equipments can have a certain weight, this requiring a correct proportional increase of the size of the magnet. The latter disadvantage, which is moreover easily referable also to other above mentioned solutions, involves the need to have wide and sufficiently flat surfaces at one's disposal in order to allow the effective adhesion of the adhesive to which the magnet system is fixed. Both the aesthetic and technological evolution in vehicle fabrication is leading de facto to the lack of surfaces with such characteristics, only small spaces being available more and more often obtained with curved surfaces.
In conclusion, the devices provided by known technology, due to their size, determine not only an increase in the production costs of the support device, but also negatively affect the aesthetic profile, making the installation of the device inside the driver and passenger compartment not very agreeable to the user, as very visible, besides significantly increasing the weight and size of the cellular equipment, when needing to apply either a ferromagnetic part or the magnet on the device. Considering all this, companies need to find innovative solutions which can overcome at least the above mentioned problems.